They said climate change would generate stronger wind shears within the jet stream, which is a major cause of turbulence.

And all kinds of turbulence was due to get worse, from light turbulence, which is due to increase by about 59 per cent in the future, through to severe turbulence, which the study suggested would see an increase of a whopping 149 per cent.

Notice how they’re saying that all this nasty stuff is only ‘due to’ happen – but aren’t actually saying that it has happened yet? Now why would that be?

I’m going to go right ahead and add this one to TMR’s running list of climate change related absurdities:

1970
Ron and I swam over several miles of reef. Everywhere was the same. The coral was dead and, although it had not been dead for long, it looked deserted. Already the marine inhabitants were leaving the ruins of their once-beautiful home.
1971
A more illustrative starting point for the theme of the permanently imminent climatic apocalypse might be taken as August 3, 1971, when The Sydney Morning Herald announced that the Great Barrier Reef would be dead in six months.
After six months the reef had not died,
1972
Three or four major threats to the GBR (Great Barrier Reef) have occurred in the past decade.
1974
The Government would create a marine park on the GBR to protect it from oil drilling, the Prime Minister, Mr Whitlam, said in a statement issued in Canberra yesterday.
1978
Unfortunately, threats to the GBR, like oil drilling and foreign fishing, exist right now.
1979
The GBR is receiving inadequate protection from a variety of undesirable activities. Foreign fishermen and professional aquarium fish collectors are two management problems.
1979
Oil poses a twofold threat to the GBR.
1980
Human activities might inadvertently be creating a scenario for the gradual destruction of the GBR, a Senate committee was warned yesterday.
1981
It is our responsibility, to ourselves and to the rest of the world, to see that it exists today and tomorrow, as it has for eons.
1984
Marine life in the GBR is being threatened by chemicals carried south by wind from the northern hemisphere, according to two Latrobe University researchers.
1988
The GBR is in danger of being destroyed by crown of thorns starfish.
1989
The GBR faces a new threat from an increase in nutrients in the ocean.
1993
The GBR was vulnerable to an oil disaster like the one off Scotland’s Shetland Islands, the Australian Democrats warned yesterday.
1994
The GBR, the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem, is also under threat.
1995
A group of big-name marine scientists will launch a public campaign next week to raise money for research into what they say are urgent threats to Australia’s GBR
2003 GBR dying?
2016
The GBR ‘dies at 25 million years old after succumbing to coral bleaching’, scientists declare
2017
The GBR is dying.
2017
GBR is damaged beyond repair and can no longer be saved, say scientists

“The University of Reading said the study, published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences journal, used supercomputer simulations of the atmosphere to calculate how wintertime clear-air turbulence on flights between Europe and the US would change at an altitude of around 12 kilometres when there is twice as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Those conditions are expected to occur later this century.”

So these are the same “supercomputer simulations of the atmosphere” (gee whiz!) that have been proven over the last 25 years to overestimate actual (benign) temperature changes by a factor of 2 to 3. Still, dreadful things are projected with remarkable precision (“a whopping 149%”) to happen exactly ….. “later this century”.

To borrow the old cosmology joke about the world resting on a tortoise, climate change is truely “models all the way down”.

I suppose we should be grateful that such nonsense on stilts is reported so frequently and so credulously by our media. The sheer repetition of this sort of silly stuff will continue to raise overall scepticism about dangerous anthropogenic global warming (or climate change, or whatever its current manifestations are said to be).